Hands-on Learning with MATLAB and Analog Discovery

In this webinar, Associate Professor Kathleen Meehan of Virginia Tech demonstrates how professors and course instructors can use MATLAB and Digilent Analog Discovery hardware to teach hands-on laboratory experiments in the area of circuit analysis. The Analog Discovery platform, co-designed by Digilent and Analog Devices, is a portable low-cost USB data acquisition device that can be used in a traditional laboratory classroom or in the students’ dorm rooms. The integration of Analog Discovery and MATLAB allows students to collect data and test the circuits they are designing to gain a deeper understanding of circuit operation.

Professor Meehan demonstrates how she uses Analog Discovery and MATLAB in her courses. In particular, she shows how students:

Use MATLAB for capacitor discharge experiments to calculate the capacitor voltage and current as a function of time in response to a transient in the applied voltage.

Use MATLAB and Analog Discovery to measure circuit performance directly so they can compare the real world measurements with their calculations.

Use a MATLAB script to create signals that are outputted to the Analog Discovery’s arbitrary waveform generator and then acquire and verify the physical signal using MATLAB and the Analog Discovery’s oscilloscope channel.

Determine the transfer function for a filter, plot the transfer function in MATLAB, build it on the breadboard, then measure the filter performance using the Analog Discovery, and finally compare the theoretical performance with the measured performance.